WorldCereal – Global crop monitoring at field scale

The overarching goal of the WorldCereal project is to develop an open source EO solution for monitoring of global crop area extent, which can be exploited by a wide community of stakeholders involved in the agricultural sector and active over a range of scales – from national agricultural reporting, regional crop productivity management, up to global assessment of cultivated crop area extent. Delivering maps of crop area extent in a timely manner and tracking its seasonal changes over time will be emphasized to monitor the dynamics of the global agricultural productive area.

The WorldCereal project has the following principal objectives:

• to demonstrate the feasibility of global crop mapping at field scale based on open high resolution EO data such as Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8;
• to develop innovative and efficient open source EO algorithms and tools making full use of cloud computing capabilities for mapping the global extent of annual cropland and two of the major staple crops wheat and maize on a seasonal basis;
• to build a collaborative approach to exchange with the agricultural community relevant in-situ data sets and disseminate the global crop mapping results in a transparent manner
• to showcase the utility of the WorldCereal products by conducting use case studies related to the GEOGLAM initiative and SDG reporting.

‪As the global crop monitoring at field scale is a true global challenge we are happy to count on an impressive international user group supporting WorldCereal: FAO, AMIS, GEOGLAM, AAFC, AFSIS, BAGE, CIMMYT, CIMMYT-GLTEN, DSSI, DG-JRC, GEOSYS, GODAN, ICARDA, ICRISAT, IFPRI, INTA, JECAM, N2AFRICA, NASAHarvest, ONESOIL, PlantVillage, RADI, ROTHAMSTED RESEARCH, WFP. The user group remains open to new stakeholders interested in contributing to the goals of WorldCereal which aims to be a community effort.